Jamie Bell Quotes

I was a terrible English student.

I read good. I was an English major.

I really liked English literature, a subject I did really well at.

I was also in love with the English language.

My mother had been a Latin teacher, and she was always very fascinated with words. She and I shared books and responded to them.

I wasn't a very good writer before college. I don't think I was a very good reader.

In seventh and eighth grade, grammar and vocabulary were not my favorite subjects.

In high school, my English teacher Celeste McMenamin introduced me to the great novels and Shakespeare and taught me how to write. Essays, poetry, critical analysis. Writing is a skill that was painful then but a love of mine now.

Writers themselves benefit from all helpful information about their task and methods. Readers, in turn, can have both their understanding and appreciation of literature enhanced by information about the writer's work.

I'm not very good at standard English.

What I realized is that my interest in literature has more deeply structured my practice than I thought.

My mother, with a Master's in English Literature, taught me to appreciate language and that words matter.

If people want to be better writers, they can't just read the blogs! You've got to look at something that's outside this rushing world of evanescent words.

I think technique can be taught but I think the only way to learn to write is to read, and I see writing and reading as completely related. One almost couldn't exist without the other.

To write you have to be able to know how to put words together.

I like English, and I like writing essays, and that kind of stuff.

The most important thing is to read as much as you can, like I did. It will give you an understanding of what makes good writing and it will enlarge your vocabulary.

I was an English major in college!

The important thing is to do what you most love in the best way. If you love literature, you could be a great writer and perhaps one day become a Nobel Prize Laureate for Literature.

I taught high school English for 24 years. I always teach my students to appreciate the beauty of language and to write poetically.

I have a slightly bad back, which has made an enormous contribution to American literature.

If people aren't creating literature, there would be nothing for people to criticize.

Long before the idea of a writer's conference was a glimmer in anyone's eye, writers learned by reading the work of their predecessors. They studied meter with Ovid, plot construction with Homer, comedy with Aristophanes; they honed their prose style by absorbing the lucid sentences of Montaigne and Samuel Johnson.

I have a Bachelor of Arts in English, which means I had a lot of formal training in reading.

All literature is gossip.